The Government has announced plans to drag the commercial court into the 21st century in an attempt to retain the UK as the leading venue for international litigation, but has the Lord Chancellor’s Department got its facts straight? asks Anne Mizzi
When the Lord Chancellor, Derry Irvine, paid Cap Gemini £400,000 to make a business case for a new Commercial Court, the market took news of the proposals for change with a large pinch of salt.
Barrister Karen Troy-Davies of Essex Court Chambers says: “I am staggered that they had to spend so much money to come to their conclusions… They did not seem to be properly briefed. I feel that on the whole it was a massive waste of public money.”
Nevertheless, last month the Lord Chancellor accepted Cap Gemini’s recommendations to build new a Commercial Court combining the existing Commercial, Admiralty, Patents and Technology and Construction Courts with modern IT facilities to attract legal business to the UK from around the world.
This means he now needs to raise a further £20m-£30m to implement the additional Commercial Court programme on top of the £50m-£60m already allocated to modernising the entire civil court system.
